


The Night Train

by glorious_spoon



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bechdel Test Pass, Gen, Nazis, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-10 02:03:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5564728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where Edith Keeler never died, Nyota Uhura is on the run from the government troops when she has a chance encounter with a stranger on a train. AU for 'The City on the Edge of Forever'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night Train

**Author's Note:**

> I always wondered what might have happened to the rest of the away team if Kirk and Spock hadn't been able to fix the timeline. This is my attempt to solve that problem.

She catches the night train to Ontario with forged papers and three hundred dollars sewn into the lining of her coat. Some of the white women cut their hair short and dress as men, but Nyota Uhura has learned the ugly rhythms of this barbaric time, and she knows that a male guise, even if she could manage it, will not save her. Not with the darkness of her skin, not with the cheekbones and mouth and thick springy hair that mark her Bantu heritage. That mark her--linguist, officer, the daughter of Starfleet ambassadors--as subhuman, fit only to bow and scrape and scrub the floors of white men.  
  
She wears plain serving-woman’s clothes and keeps her eyes down when the guards speak to her. It does not come naturally. The black women of this time have the mask of subservience down to an art, but Nyota is accustomed to speaking with authority and being treated with respect. Her papers will not stand up to a close inspection though, and it’s that knowledge that hunches her shoulders, that twists her hands into anxious knots. The blond-haired guard takes his time about it, finally hands them back. “You’re Ginny Mason?”  
  
“Yessir,” Nyota mumbles, keeping her gaze fixed on the breast-pocket of his uniform jacket. The eagle insignia hangs slightly crooked.  
  
“You’re entering into service with Captain Henry Washburne?”  
  
The real Ginny Mason drowned as a toddler, some twenty-five years past. In her own time, it would have been the work of a moment to check that; in this time, records are bulky paper, stored in files that take time to access, and effort; more effort, certainly, than a nobody like her warrants. She hopes, anyway. “Yessir.”  
  
Another long, penetrating silence. Her Starfleet training demands that she lift her chin and look him in the eye. Her communications training urges her to catalogue his face, his expression, the wordless tells that are as essential as language. She does neither. His uniform is rumpled, a loose thread dangling from the third buttonhole. He must not have a wife to press it, or if he does she is indifferent about the task. His accent is American, not German--that’s more common these days. A grotesque kind of integration.  
  
Finally, he grunts, says, “You’ll have to register at the next checkpoint. Make your mark here.”  
  
A book is thrust in front of her, open to a lined page that is half-full. Nyota take the pen he thrusts at her and makes an illegible mark; she can write in seven different Terran scripts and four alien ones, but that is a skill that will do her no good here.  
  
He jerks pen and notebook out of her hand as soon as the point leaves the page, moves on to the next passenger. Nyota leans forward in her seat, puts her face in her hands, and breathes deep and slow until her blood stops pounding in her ears.  
  
These days, indifference seems to be all the kindness the universe can offer her.

* * *

She wonders, sometimes, about her distant ancestors in what they now call the Congo. What patchwork history she has managed to piece together in this godforsaken timestream is almost uniformly terrible; in the original timestream, the 20th and 21st centuries were not exactly kind to her people, but what has been done to the world under the auspices of the Third Reich is immeasurably worse.  
  
She wonders if a great-great-great-grandmother will die choking in the diamond mines or somewhere worse, and she will simply and suddenly wink out of existence. She wonders, sometimes, if that might not be kinder.  
  
She does not wonder about Hikaru Sulu or Montgomery Scott, left behind at the Guardian’s gate. She does not wonder about Christine Chapel or Jabilo M’Benga or her baba in the little house back on Earth that has been in the family for four generations. She does not think of them at all, if she can help it.

* * *

It seems unthinkable, but she manages to sleep sometime in the long stretch of wilderness around the Niagara army base. When she blinks awake to darkness, her face pressed against the cool glass, she is momentarily disoriented; the clatter of rails and the rush of wind outside becomes, for a heartsick moment, the life-support system on the _Enterprise_. She opens her eyes and almost expects to see the smooth gray ceiling of her small bunk, to hear Christine humming in their shared bathroom, but the moment is fleeting. The air around her smells of tobacco smoke, body odor, and damp wool, not chemical recyclers.  
  
A warm hand touches her elbow, and she nearly jumps out of her skin.  
  
“Shh,” whispers a woman’s voice, soft but firm. “At the next stop, you need to get off. They’re inspecting the train. Your papers won’t hold up.”  
  
Every muscle in Nyota’s body goes tight as she turns. “How do you--”  
  
“ _Hush_ ,” the woman repeats. Her features are pale, cast in sickly yellow shadows by the electric lamp overhead. In another life, she must have been very pretty; now, a terrible scar twists one side of her face into a permanent sneer. Nyota manages not to recoil, but it’s a nearer thing than she’d like to admit. She always forgets how primitive medicine is here, how one superficial injury can mean permanent disfigurement. “Get off at the next stop.”  
  
“It’s snowing out.” The protest sounds petulant, almost childish, to her ears as soon as she voices it, but the fact remains: it is the dead of winter, her coat is more hole than cloth, and her shoes have cardboard soles. They are still at least seventy miles from the safehouse, and she will certainly freeze to death before she can get there. “I’ll take my chances.”  
  
The woman sighs. “You’ll be dead, you mean.”  
  
“A bullet’s quicker than freezing,” Nyota says, with a bravado she doesn’t quite feel.  
  
The woman glances behind her, lowers her voice again. “I know a man who can take you across the border, but only if you get off at the next stop.”  
  
Nyota considers asking _at what price_ , but decides against it. She knows the payment a man will ask for. That’s something to be negotiated later, if it comes to that. If she decides to trust this stranger, who knows that her papers are fake but hasn’t--yet--called the guards.  
  
It could still be a trap. Nyota shakes her head, feeling suddenly very tired. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”  
  
“You don’t,” the woman says simply. She stands, steps out into the aisle. “You can call me E. Go into the station; don’t speak to anyone. I’ll find you.”  
  
Before Nyota can respond, she has disappeared into the back of the train. Lieutenant Uhura, communications officer on the finest ship in the Fleet, would have followed her and demanded an explanation. But Nyota, who has been on the run for weeks and living in fear for months before that, who exists in the shattered pieces of a world that was never meant to be, can only huddle around her threadbare carpet-bag and try not to weep.  
  
At the next stop, she gets off the train.

* * *

Fat flurries catch the light of the streetlamps as they fall, the fresh snow on the ground clean and glittering. It makes the deserted station look ethereally beautiful, like a fairy tale brought to life--or it would, if not for the bronze swastika jutting above the entrance. Nyota averts her eyes as she passes, does not meet the guard's cold gaze. Behind her, the train pulls away from the station with a whistle and a clatter, and now she is committed.  
  
The station is warm, and strangely empty even given the time of night. A group of uniformed soldiers are passing around a cigarette, and she gives them a wide berth. E is nowhere to be seen.  
  
The back of her neck prickles, the very emptiness of the station setting her off her ease. Foolish. It's not as though a crowd would save her; last week, a colored woman was beaten to death in the street and no one intervened. It's a peculiar cowardice of these soft citizens, and it is becoming harder and harder not to despise them for it.  
  
The ticket booth is still open, the man behind it sallow and bored. Nyota drifts past him, averting her eyes; he does not call her back, or even seem to notice that she’s there. Past the turnstile is a small figure swathed in gray, hands tucked away, apparently immersed in contemplation of a gaudy propaganda poster. She turns at the soft click of Nyota’s heels, and her ruined face creases into a smile.  
  
“You came,” she says.  
  
Nyota clutches at her bag. The back of her neck itches as though an SS officer’s hand might clamp down on it at any moment, but she forces her back straight, her face calm. “Yes. I came.”  
  
E nods. “I’m glad.”  
  
“Why?” Nyota asks.  
  
“Why what?”  
  
“Why are you glad? What is this to you?” It comes out harsh, her own voice alien to her ears. She comes from a kinder, wiser, better time--but here and now, trusting strangers is a good way to die. Or worse. “Why help me?”  
  
E sighs and pushes the hood back from her hair, suddenly looking much older. “Would you believe that I’m trying to set the world right?”  
  
To set the world right. Her captain and her first officer came here on just that fool’s errand, three hundred and eighty years in the future, or six months ago, depending on which way she calculates the dates. They failed. She’s not sure exactly when they landed in this timestream, but it was at least a decade past. They failed, and they’re probably dead, and this tiny, fragile pixie of a woman wants to do what they couldn’t.  
  
To set the world right. Nyota shakes her head, but it’s not in denial. “That’s too big a job for any one person.”  
  
“I know,” E says, and smiles tiredly. “I said I could get you across the border, if that’s what you want. I meant it. My man is reliable, and the Mounties are holding firm for now. You might be safe in Canada.” She pauses.  
  
“Or?”  
  
“Or you can join us,” E says. “I know you were running communications for the Underground out of Harlem. We could use a person of your skills.”  
  
It is that, paradoxically, that makes Nyota relax. If the SS had any idea who she really is--if they knew she was more than just a registration-dodger with an unusually good forger--she’d have been arrested and interrogated long ago, not chivvied along to a remote train-station in upstate New York and given what she is just beginning to recognize as a very unusual job interview. “I was caught.”  
  
“You were reported,” E says, and that’s something Nyota had always suspected--her encryption techniques rely on language groups that no other human being yet speaks; the odds of the SS cracking it are miniscule. As it was, she had just enough warning to get out.  
  
“A double-agent?”  
  
E nods.  
  
“You don’t even know my real name,” Nyota says. No one does. The cell she was a part of had worked on initials alone; she knew next to nothing about the men and women she fought beside for months. A security measure. The last person to speak her name was Montgomery Scott, when he wished her luck at the Guardian’s gate.  
  
“I have faith in your skill, all the same,” E says. “Will you come?”  
  
Nyota glances toward the station again. No one is paying them any mind. She could go now; she could take the help E is offering--she might even be able to hop the next train and hide until the inspection is past. She could cross over to Canada and turn her back, hope that this all just goes away. Or--  
  
“All right,” she says. “I’ll stay.”  
  
“I’m glad to hear it,” E says. “My name is Edith Keeler.”  
  
“Nyota Uhura.”  
  
Edith holds out her hand. Nyota takes it; her palm is calloused, her grip firm. “Welcome aboard, Miss Uhura.”  
  
Nyota lifts her head, feels her back straighten. Feels, for the first time in months, like herself. “It’s Lieutenant, actually.”  
  
Edith nods without missing a beat. “Lieutenant Uhura. I’m very glad to meet you.”

 


End file.
